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Monthly Archives: April 2013

Today was another meeting with my psych, and a new medication, after the last one gave me the wonderful gift of hyperprolactinaemia, which can apparently increase your risk of various girly cancers and osteoporosis. Not a fan of those things, so we try again.

I’m being started on buproprion, another antidepressant, this time affecting norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake. It’s a completely different mechanism of action from anything I’ve tried, so this really is a step into the unknown.

Additionally, I’ve been started on vitamin B supplements, after my blood tests showed a relatively low level of vitamin B12 in my blood. Not deficiency-low, but low enough that supplementation might help. It can’t hurt at least – B vitamins are water-soluble, so any excess will just be excreted.

All in all, I have a bit of hope for a different outcome, combined with a general weariness with this entire process. I just want to feel normal and well again, and it’s wearing me down to be battling with trying to find medication and therapy that might help.

Today, when it was time to start making dinner, my partner wasn’t in a good mood. This happens sometimes, to everyone. But what was interesting was my reaction to it.

I’m not good with tension, but I’ve never really analysed my reaction before. Today, in light of the diagnosis of PTSD, I thought a bit more about what was happening inside me when there was tension around me.

I tend to withdraw, and I get very quiet, and try to get on with what I’m doing with minimal noise. I realised that this is a throw-back to my early teens, when it was dangerous to disturb my stepmother if she was moody. I learned to be as quiet and efficient as I could be in hope of not becoming the subject of her ire.

I still do this, and I still feel all the fear that I did back then, even though I know I am safe now. There’s no logic to how I feel and react. I’m safe, I’m loved, and I’m never going to be hurt the way I was back then, but the experiences of my youth have coloured how I deal with my world.

When I was fourteen years old, I tried to kill myself for the first time. My home life was so intolerable that I just wanted out. I couldn’t cope with it any more. I’d heard from a friend that a whole pack of paracetamol could kill you, so I swallowed a full pack of it at my school play cast afterparty.

My boyfriend of the time knew something was wrong, and he managed to get out of me what I’d done. So I pretended to throw them back up, and he let me go to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, he’d stayed the night with me to keep an eye on me. I started throwing up repeatedly, and he called his dad and got me to the hospital. I was very sick.

The only clear memory I have of that bit is that I begged and begged not to have my father and stepmother called. I didn’t win that fight – I was a minor after all – and when they came down to the hospital I begged for my boyfriend to stay because I didn’t want to be alone with them. Eventually he left – I don’t remember when or why.

My only other clear memory of that time is terror. Terror that my stepmother would do something to me in revenge for me messing up her day. Never mind that I was very unwell, my only fear was that I wouldn’t die and that she would punish me in some way.

At some point I was sent home, and I think it was maybe a week before sI was back to anywhere near normal. And then, the letter came from CAFS.

CAFS is the child, adolescent, and family service at the hospital. They deal with child mental health and abuse, among other things. They also have a very similar acronym to CYFS – Child, Youth, and Family Services – our child protection agency.

When that letter came, my stepmother went nuts at me for getting CYFS involved with our family. It took her a while to figure out it was the hospital, not the dreaded child services. And even then, she was still furious at me for bringing outsiders into our lives.

The CAFS interview was one of those moments where I have no idea why we weren’t saved in some way. It was a family interview, they never talked to me alone, and through the entire interview my stepmother held my wrist, digging her nails into me every time I had to answer a question. I lied through my teeth, I told them it was an accident, that I never meant to hurt myself. Inside I was screaming ‘save us, please save us’ – my little brother and I were struggling to hold it together in the face of her abuse. But I lied heroically, because she was there and I was so scared.

If they’d just talked to me alone, made me safe so I could tell, I would have told. Maybe there would have been something done. I will forever regret lying that day and not saving my little brother and me from more abuse. But I was so afraid of her that I couldn’t tell.

No fourteen-year old ‘accidentally’ swallows a whole packet of paracetamol. They had to know something was wrong. But they never gave me a safe way to tell, and so I didn’t. I couldn’t. I will always feel guilt for not telling. But I’m not sure they would have done anything, even if I had said something.

I was abused as an adolescent. Even when it was happening, I knew it wasn’t normal, but I was scared to ask for help. Reading this reminded me of the only time I ever tried to get help.

I was maybe fourteen. I’d done something wrong the night before (I don’t remember what, but I think it had something to do with washing my clothes) and it had lead to a beating. This wasn’t common – most of the abuse was psychological and emotional – but it did happen now and then. I ended up with a line of bruises on each side of my spine, where my stepmother punched me. She was smart – she never hit where it would be seen while I was wearing clothes.

What she didn’t know was that I was one of the few girls my age that wasn’t ashamed of their body, and so I would just strip down and then kit up for PE. That day, I lifted my shirt over my head and squeaked a bit in pain. A friend who was changing beside me looked over and saw the bruises, and that was it. I was taken to see the assistant principal, and made to tell her what happened.

The next bit it a blur. My father was called in, and he made excuses for my stepmother. My little brother was picked up from school, by one of my teachers I think. There was a lot of fuss going on . . . and then nothing. We were taken home by my father. Nothing further happened.

I was terrified. It had taken all my strength to tell, and nothing had come of it. And now my stepmother was furious. She didn’t beat me again, but for weeks afterward she would terrorise me in whatever ways she could come up with.

You’re supposed to tell when bad things go on in your life. If you tell a teacher they’re supposed to make you safe. But no-one made me and my little brother safe.

I’m left with PTSD from what happened to me in the five or six years between when my father married and when my stepmother threw me out. I don’t remember much of it, but sometimes, I’ll do something, or see something, or smell something, and it all just comes back. It paralyses me.

I asked for help. I did what I was supposed to do. But no-one took it seriously enough to make me safe.

After less than a week on venlafaxine, my body decided that the coolest idea ever was to have a repeat performance of the hyperprolactinaemia. Swollen, heavy breasts dripping milk periodically is not anyone’s idea of fun, and so I’m off the venlafaxine.

Of course, this means another rather expensive visit to the psychiatrist, but I guess that’s just all part of the game. Maybe I’ll get lucky on the next experiment. It’s kind of frustrating, because other than the galactorrhea, I was tolerating the venlafaxine better than most of the meds I’ve tried so far. I’m not winning here.

It’s six months since the crippling depression hit, and today’s my one-year anniversary with my wonderful partner. He;s stuck with me through this hellish time, when a lot of others would have cut out and run. I don’t know what I would do without him. And my mum. She’s awesome too.

Without a good support network, mental health issues can be devastating, especially to people with young children. I’m lucky to have the people I have in my life.

I’m trying to write a decently large (2000-word) assignment at the moment, and my concentration is just rubbish. I can write a couple of sentences, maybe a paragraph, before my mind wanders off on a tangent.

This seems to be a growing pattern – I can’t do anything for long without my brain haring off on its own. I miss chunks of conversation because something that was said made me think of something else, and off I go into my own little world.

Typing is a struggle because I can’t concentrate on the word I’m trying to type, and other words spill out instead. They’re still words, so the spell-checker doesn’t catch them, but on reading over what I’ve written, ‘the’ would have come out as ‘that’, or ‘something’ as ‘sometimes’. Or ‘inculcate’ as ‘intubate’.

All this makes me worry about what is going to happen at exam time. Will I be able to write coherent exam essays? I have no idea, to be honest. I’m going to apply for impaired performance if I don’t feel like I did well, since my essay work is usually good enough for me to be considered. But still, I feel pretty bad not being able to work to the best of my usual ability.

Today I actually managed to join a gym! It’s a major part of the treatment plan that my doctor has laid out for me, and I can see why it’s a good idea. Plus, it will help with the weight I’ve gained – 18kg! I was horrified to step on the scales there, but I need a baseline to look at my progress against.

I spent an hour there, did a weights round and thirty-five minutes of cardio work. Had a lovely shower, came home. Problem is, now I feel . . . I don’t know. Flat. Empty. Sad.

Going to the gym always used to make me feel good, but right now I feel pretty down. I feel guilty for going out instead of working on the assignment that’s due tomorrow. I don’t have the ‘high’ that going to the gym used to give me, and that makes me feel even more guilty, for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom.

I’m going to keep going – I’m not paying $15 a week to not go! – and maybe it will get better. But right now, I just feel like I’m going to cry.